Maurice Bloomfield was our greatest Sanskritist after Whitney. Whitney was a pioneer; Bloomfield the colonizer. His dynamic teaching and deep abiding interest in the careers of his students combined with a scholarly career that not only demonstrated to students the application of imagination and breadth of knowledge to various problems of Indo-European philology and Sanskrit texts, but also left comprehensive works of reference which made the study of these fields easier for generations to come. His chief contribution is his Vedic Concordance, a tool of inestimable value, the product of painstaking arrangement and execution. G. M. Boiling called him, "the first of all Atharvanists and in the foremost rank of interpreters of the Vedas in general." But he was a significant linguist (though not of the stature of his nephew Leonard), second president of the Linguistic Society of America, and conveyor of European researches on the new study of Indo-European language to this country, chiefly through his numerous articles and reviews in AJP. In this field his posthumous Vedic Variants is characteristic in its identification and solution of problem speech-forms in the texts.His devoted students spoke of the intellectual challenge of his classes, the reward of working with him and, especially, his example not only of investigation and industry into the language, but the personal involvement in the nurturing of those who shared his interests and commitment. Perhaps more to be lamented than the loss from linguistics of his method of scientific inquiry in Sanskrit, Indo-European, and general linguistics is the example for the hundreds of students who took his linguistics courses at Johns Hopkins, a paradigm of patient, intelligent, learned inquiry for solutions to real problems, free from the yoke of dogma or fashion.

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